Monday, March 11, 2013

10:00 – 10:30 – Meet with steering committee co-chairs
10:30 – 11:15 – Meet with entire steering committee. This is period 7 in the schedule
11:15 – 12:00 – Lunch in the Wagner Room with whoever would like to stay and central office administration
12:00 – Walk the building and Joe depart when ready

Friday, January 11, 2013

No fancy pictures today. Just the facts. We went through the preliminary schedule for Sunday, April 7, and created a ToDo list, allocating responsibilities to steering committee members. Our next meeting: January 29, 2013 in library work room.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

We have a meeting scheduled with Jill Robey, PFA president. for Thursday, January 17, 2013 in the library workroom. Any steering committee member who wants to can stop by. We will begin planning for the parent involvement during the April visit.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Today's work:Complete evidence form for the evidence you brought today. Please attach the 21st century learning rubric that was used for assessment. Before you fill out your evidence sheets, be sure to review your copy of the four instructional standards indicators (we distributed copies). While all of our work may look like it should be classified as assessment, we have a lot of evidence in that category already. Give it a hard look to make sure that it can't go into another category.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Interestingly, co-writing the “rough daft” for the NEASC
report on Assessment, Indicator 4 was easier than I thought it would be because
of New Canaan High School’s responsive and collaborative culture. It was
amazing to review the many Indicator 4 documents and artifacts. Teachers are integrating
NCHS Core Values, Beliefs and
Expectations, as well as Partnership
for 21st Century Skills (P21).

Thursday, April 19, 2012

The Counseling department has an update about piloting the contribution rubric.

CTE & Math have an update about piloting the problem solving rubric.

Met with committee co-chairs and department chairs last week. If you need help arranging a meeting with anyone from central office, town organizations or community members, please let us know. We made a form to facilitate requests.

Visiting committee opportunities in June. Please let us know if you are interested.

Timeline: Last PD day 1/2 TEPL, 1/2 NEAS&C - Goal: Have very rough draft complete by the end of of day on June 22.

After that, we will duck into Department Chairs meeting, which will already be in progress. We will share the outcomes of the Steering Committee and the Committee Co-Chairs meeting. Our preliminary outline follows:

The self-study report should reflect a common understanding of school-wide assessment practices. One suggestion was to use the same student evidence for Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment, which we are in the process of doing.

Prior to the publication of the final draft, these three committees will share their finding to look for alignment.

Steering committee will facilitate meetings with central office, support staff (NURSES!) and other stakeholders. A form will go out on Friday, March 16 prompting committees members to articulate their needs. The steering committee will schedule requested meetings.

Each committee will go through the exercise of self-assessing using the NEAS&C rating guide as a group (these are now on the nchsneasc13.info website).

We’ve appointed an editing committee for the final draft.

We will be creating a student work portfolio for the visiting committee to review on Sunday night once they return to the hotel, Examples should be assessed by the 21st century learning expectations rubrics.

Steering committee will appoint a coordinator to liaise with Endicott and track parent participation. May require some “nudging”. Student participation is scheduled for April.

Would like to encourage faculty to update their committee’s self-study document (the one embedded in your standard page on the nchsneasc13.info website) with in-progress indicator work. We are aiming for transparency in this process. It is important for the committee to see drafts and revisions (document history) as you acquire evidence and apply it to the self-study as measured by indicators.

School-wide rubrics and 21st century learning expectations: The visiting committee will expect to see that these are bring used throughout the school and across disciplines.

The steering committee is compiling a list of community stakeholders to participate in committee work - not necessarily face-to-face, but certainly as a part of the the committee's electronic correspondence.

Ever feel shackled by a rubric? Like rubrics are trying to drive a wedge between you and your students? NCHS teacher, unchain yourself! Rubrics don’t have that kind of power.

Rubric is one of those words that has a bum rap; just ask any teacher who knew that a project was a C+ when the rubric insisted it was a B. But perception isn’t reality, and rubrics aren’t just for assessment anymore.

More importantly, rubrics are for communication.

Think about it: we want kids to be effective problem solvers, clear communicators, responsible and productive collaborators, among other things. We also need to teach our course content. How do we know how to connect the important content we teach to the important skills they need to learn? Simple: listen to the rubric.

The bullet points in those boxes are the places where our learning expectations reside. They articulate skills that we have always assumed we were teaching, and they show us something we might not have known: that social studies teachers are asking kids to collaborate the same way they do in an engineering class; that science teachers are demanding the same clear communication as English teachers.

By breaking those skills into their constituent parts, and naming those parts, what we teach becomes clearer to us. And by sharing those expectations with students, they know exactly what they should know. That’s communication, baby.

Then, when students hand in their work, we use the rubric to let them know where they are in their understanding of our learning expectations, and give them a chance to tell us how they plan to improve. So the cycle of communication between teachers and students, with the rubric as common ground, continues to clarify and specify exactly what we want students to achieve.